Local city governments balance employee wages, benefits

It’s a challenge to find and keep good employees.

That’s according to Greg McClain, the city manager for Maryville. He’s been with the city for years and seen the economy in its ups and downs. In a legislative briefing for local business owners earlier this month, he said the employment challenge is something the public and private sectors face. Workers anticipate larger paychecks as wages continue rising to keep up.

But what if the budget is limited by something like tax dollars?

“It’s important not to forget that Maryville as an organization has no money,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday, June 26. “We are simply stewards of the citizens and the taxpayers’ money.”

After filing more than half a dozen information requests, The Daily Times has compiled a list featuring the pay rate of every city employee in the county as of June 2024. The results show the average compensation for a municipal employee in Blount County.

It’s around $50-60,000 annually.

Pay can spike over $150,000, while part-time positions can fall below $15,000. Some elected positions, such as Maryville City Council members and Greenback Aldermen, also collect monthly stipends as compensation for their work, while other city officials perform their duties entirely for free.

Compensation

Maryville boasts some of the highest salaries when compared to its neighbors, but McClain said he feels that leads to better employee retention. Underpaying employees can lead them to move on quickly, and it often costs more to train a new employee than paying the difference that would make them stay.

“We’ve been criticized by some who say we make too much’” he said, adding, “We believe if you pay them a bit more, you show them you appreciate them and that you’re competitive, you don’t have turnover in the long run and you’re saving money.”

But no matter how high Maryville’s wages might be, McClain admitted the private sector often presents more monetary value. Although he doesn’t see employees regularly leaving the city for corporate jobs, Maryville has been “cautiously” adjusting wages to keep them competitive, opting to focus on making its job openings equal in value instead of pay.

For many cities in the area, that means concentrating on benefits. McClain said he feels municipalities have held onto more benefits overall when compared to private employers.

Retirement benefits in particular are a tool local cities use to aid employees. Although Louisville Mayor Jill Pugh said the city hasn’t struggled to find and retain hires in recent years, she said the city has recently developed its first employee benefits package anyway. The program works with the state to provide access to health insurance and retirement funds.

Louisville is a smaller city. That means fewer employees, but it also means smaller salaries.

“Most of our employees have been long-term employees,” Pugh said. “There’s been one or two that we’ve hired since I became mayor, but other than that they’re all long-term.”

Adding a benefits package, Pugh said, has helped keep the city competitive next to the private sector. One employee who left Louisville due to the lack of benefits even returned once the city implemented the new program.

The jump wasn’t without work. Despite the advantages, Pugh said the difficulty of getting the benefits package up and running was daunting.

“They walked us through the process, but it was pretty in-depth,” she said. “I have wondered if some small towns struggle with pushing that through.”

Value

Holding onto long-term employees can make a world of difference for municipalities. Someone with a decade of experience in the electric department, for example, knows the system inside and out. The loss of a lifelong city employee, McClain said, is like losing a library.

That’s why Friendsville Executive Assistant Kim Rogers said the city also concentrates on benefits. Taking care of employees, she said, can make the difference between them staying or moving on — taking their years of knowledge with them. The city tries to be flexible when it comes to time off, knowing the hours employees work don’t always line up with the rest of the world.

“I’ve worked in a corporate setting for 10 years, and if your time off wasn’t planned, you got dinged,” said Rogers. “For me, that makes it really important to be able to do those things.”

Because Friendsville is another smaller municipality, Rogers said its nine employees all wear multiple hats. Staff try to be upfront during the hiring process and prefer people with experience in the field, but aren’t afraid to train new workers. The city realized it needed to up its pay to compete with the private sector after comparing rates. In 2018, Friendsville’s starting rate was $14.50 per hour, but utility rates often start around $17, Rogers said.

After the city lost two potential hires over pay in the space of three weeks, she said staff and officials sat down to examine the situation and came up with the current plan.

Funding is one of the main challenges the city faces when it comes to payroll. Friendsville’s operations are not tax-based, meaning everything comes from revenues. And to make matters more complicated, city employees must be paid out of revenues linked to their employment.

“If you have city workers, you have to pay for them out of the city,” Rogers said. “If you have water employees, you have to pay for them out of water revenues.”

Combined with the rising cost of materials post-pandemic, that can often squeeze budgets in municipalities.

McClain described the weight of employee salaries and frugality as a balance. Maryville wants to pay its employees fair wages while always being reasonable with taxpayers’ money. That balance, he said, is something he takes seriously.

“We don’t make any of these decisions carelessly or selfishly,” he said. “We’re looking at it from both sides. We’ve got employees we’ve got to pay what they’re worth and be competitive, and at the same time, it’s not our money. We try to be extra responsible.”